


Next Chapter

by mylittleredgirl



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, Reading, canon compliant until september, non-sexual acts of intimacy, season one, season two, some kind of soft vibe literary soulmate nonsense, speculative season three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 15:21:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13616142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylittleredgirl/pseuds/mylittleredgirl
Summary: For thenon-sexual acts of intimacyprompt: Reading a book together.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThatAloneOne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAloneOne/gifts).



::attempt #1::

Eleanor is not a quiet reader.

It’s not a surprise. Chidi has only known her for a few weeks—if the passage of time even matters in an eternal afterlife—but that’s more than enough to know that Eleanor Shellstrop doesn’t do _anything_ quietly: she snores, she yelps 80s songs in the shower, she insults inanimate objects as she walks around the house. And she _talks_ , always interrupting and commenting and arguing, pushing him to respond before he’s had a chance to think anything through. If the concept of distraction took on human form, it’d be Eleanor—surprising and messy and _loud_.

She snaps her gum a few times, dog-ears the page while she flips to the index, then flips back and starts to hum. Again.

Chidi clears his throat for the third time, not that she seems to notice. She’s probably doing it on purpose, trying to annoy him into paying attention to her. He hates that it _works_ —he hasn’t read more than a handful of pages since Eleanor flopped down on the minimalist approximation of a couch and kicked a stack of books off the coffee table to make room for her feet. (“What? It’s not like you paid for them.”)

He could retire to his bedroom to read at a regular, uninterrupted pace, but damn it, he was sitting here _first_. He wills himself to block her out and glares down at the familiar passage in front of him—

_What is essential in the moral worth of actions—the moral worth of actions—WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IN THE MORAL WORTH OF ACTIONS—_

—but even Kant isn’t enough to hold his attention. When he ignores Eleanor, all he can hear is the grinding of contradictions and concerns and barely corralled panic in his head: The ethical duty— _his_ ethical duty—to help another person in need is in direct conflict with his obligation to the greater society, with an ever-expanding chain of moral consequences. He’s complicit now in everything Eleanor does, from shrimp to sinkholes. They’re going to get _caught_ , Eleanor eternally damned and Chidi left alone in a eternity of paired souls. 

Even here, in paradise, he can’t shake the feeling that he’ll never be happy. 

Eleanor curses a half-censored rant about the sexual predilections of Icelandic furniture designers and tosses an offending throw pillow across the room, and he's both annoyed and grateful when it startles him out of his thoughts. That happens a lot, with Eleanor—Chidi feeling two wildly different things at the same time, and both more intensely than he’s totally comfortable with. Frustration, mixed with affection. Fear and resolve. The hot burn of anger alongside something bright and unfamiliar and urgent, something that makes him feel... well, ironically, _alive_. 

Eleanor aggressively rearranges herself until she’s halfway draped off the couch. She knocks a mug off the table in the process, looks down at the spill, then leaves it on the floor. 

He clears his throat.

 _“What?”_ she says. “It’s just _water.”_

“But _you_ spilled it!”

Her eyes light up with a combative spark, and Chidi bites back the lecture in his throat, because giving her the argument she’s looking for feels too much like rewarding her for bad behavior. Then he gets up to clean up the mess, because even if it’s just water, it’s what _people do, Eleanor,_ it’s what _reasonable people—_

“No, fine, I’ll do it.” Eleanor gets up with a full-body eyeroll, flipping her book face-down without taking care to keep the pages flat. “I’m a good person, I clean up things that don’t even _stain_ , whatever.” 

She huffs into the kitchen, and Chidi lasts a second and a half before he can’t stand the crumpled book pages and reaches over to fix it.

“Eyes on your own work, nerd,” she yells, and God help him, he smiles.


	2. Chapter 2

::attempt #803:: 

She’s bored, is why. 

Tahani and Jason left hours ago, Janet's off-line for maintenance, and Chidi’s been in town far longer than it usually takes to get frozen yogurt. She’d worry, their being surrounded by demons and all, but he mentioned stopping by the bookstore, and the last time he did _that_ he came home after dark with liquid yogurt and 13 volumes of Proust. So here she is, phone-less, done with her homework (something which, quite literally, has only ever happened in hell), left home alone with seven million TV channels and nothing on. 

There’s always _Cannonball Run 2_ , beckoning from its worn cardboard sleeve, but she’s watched the last thirty seconds of Mindy’s home movie a dozen times already today and she’s starting to really creep herself out. 

But whatever: she’s bored, and that’s why she’s snooping around the stack of books at Chidi’s favorite chair, no other reason. That’s why she starts thumbing through them, pausing at the post-it flags with Chidi’s handwriting on them. It's not his blackboard handwriting, or his red-pen _‘‘some old guy at Denny’s’ is not a valid source’_ handwriting, but the shorthand he'll jot down just for himself with a pencil, scratchy and hard to read. She can’t parse out most of his notes, understands even less of the book passages themselves, and while that all makes sense given their different interests and pursuits in life, it’s disappointing. She should be able to understand more of this stuff by now without Chidi explaining it to her. 

Maybe she’ll do some unassigned reading—and ugh, that’s something else she’d only consider in hell, where she’s been so warped by ethics lessons and the lack of social media that she’s turning to _books_ for amusement. It would be fun to surprise Chidi though, someday. Casually drop some philosophical knowledge he doesn’t expect her to have, just to see what his face does. 

The door opens, and Eleanor puts his book on top of the stack like she hasn’t been rifling through his things. She turns around with her best innocent smile. “Hey ther—what the fork happened to you!?”

“Vicky,” he says—or something like “Vicky”, because it’s hard to hear him through a face full of needles. 

“Janet?” Eleanor calls in hope, but there’s no beep and no Janet. Chidi looks about nine seconds from panic. “It’s fine! We don’t need Janet,” she says, guiding him to the couch. There’s a weird feeling in Eleanor's chest, like something’s trapped inside her ribs. “They don’t look deep. I can pull them out myself.” 

Chidi makes a distressed noise, more objection than pain. 

“Hey now, don’t doubt my kitchen first aid skills. Believe it or not, demon needles are _not_ the weirdest thing I’ve ever removed from someone’s face, and I was six shots in at the time. I’m totally sober right now! Which means I’m basically a surgeon.” She’s trying to reassure him, but it doesn’t seem to be working. She tries another tack: _“You,_ on the other hand, should get drunk as quickly as possible.”

He doesn’t (“Alcohol is a blood thinner!” “And what, you’re going to bleed to death?”), but he does sip some whiskey through a straw when she offers it to him, and he eventually lies back and lets her pull the needles out with eyebrow tweezers. She’s being careful not to hurt him, so it takes a while, Chidi wincing up at her while she nags at him to hold still and stop tensing up. 

And, okay, maybe likes the warm weight of his head in her lap. They’re being tortured by demons; she’ll take her small joys where she can find them.

When the last one is out, she soaks a clean dish towel in vodka and hands it to him, watches him wipe down his face and the tops of his feet. He lies back on the couch, looking exhausted and miserable and more than a little pathetic, covered with tiny welts like he was bitten by a horde of mosquitoes. 

She should let him rest, but it feels like there should be more for her to do. “Do you want a... book? Or something?” She fishes one out of the pile by his chair—not one of the dense texts covered in post-its, but an Agatha Christie paperback. It suits him, in a way. A tidy, finite parcel of escapism, one with cleverly laid clues and a right answer. 

He says, “I don't want to keep my eyes open.” 

That weird feeling is back, the one that makes her want to take care of him. 

“I could read it to you in a terrible British accent,” she offers. “I won’t even spoil the ending for you.”

“I’ve already read it.” 

Undeterred, Eleanor opens the book to the first page. “The butler did it. That’s not a spoiler, by the way, I’m just calling it.”

“How do you even know there’s a butler?” 

“There’s always a butler. In this version, he’ll be played by Stephen Fry. No—who’s that guy from The Nanny?”

She can see the smile he’s trying to hide. “Eleanor—”

“Shut up. _In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired_ —”

“You’re not really going to read it in that voice, are you?”

She does.


	3. Chapter 3

::attempt #804/gen’s attempt #1::

Chidi leaves the St. John’s campus on time for the third day in a row. He stops on the way home to pick up bread and lactose-free milk and, after only twenty minutes of deliberation, a bottle of nice red wine.

He’s not rushing home, exactly, but he walks briskly, only slowing to side-step the square of pavement where a falling air conditioner almost crushed him last year. At first, after it happened, he varied his route to work to avoid the twice-daily reminder of how close he might be at every moment to a sudden and final end. At some point in the summer, he found himself back on the familiar path, and he never bothered to leave it again. 

When he remembers the almost-accident, it comes back in shards of sensation—the scrape of his cheek on the pavement after a stranger shoved him out of the way, the crunch of metal and plastic near his ears, the burning clarity in his chest that felt like something alive. He didn’t sleep for 24 hours, pounding coffee to stay awake and aspirin for his cramping fingers as he filled a hardbound notebook with a list of everything he wants to do before he dies. Everything he would do, if he weren’t so rooted in indecision and fixed thinking. If he were braver.

Eleanor had a near-death experience last year too, and that’s the best reason Chidi can come up with for how he doesn’t know her, has never known anyone like her, but there’s something about her he recognizes. Three days ago, an American stranger walked into his office and bared her soul, and it was somehow so _easy_ to promise to help her, like the decision was already made.

When he gets home, Eleanor is on his couch, feet on the coffee table, reading his copy of _The Republic_. “Hey,” she says. “I really think they’d sell more of these if they put in pictures. Not to mention—the first two _hundred_ pages of this? Aren’t even the book! Just some nerd with a boner for footnotes writing _about_ the book.”

“Yes, that’s what academics do.”

“You picked a hell of a profession, bud.”

They go out for dinner. Eleanor orders the shrimp.

*

Dinner rolls into dessert, and a long walk, and most of the bottle of wine. Eleanor is careless and rude and whip-smart and _funny_ , and he likes her, really enjoys her company. It’s late, and a school night, but Chidi’s not quite ready to end the evening when the conversation slows, so he ends up drifting between _The Metaphysics of Morals_ and watching Eleanor peruse his bookshelves. She provides running commentary at first, mostly pointing out which ones seem especially boring and twisting the titles into double entendres, but after a while, she grows quiet. 

Then: “It’s impressive that you... you know, _know_ all this boring stuff.” 

It’s a compliment, he thinks. “Thank you?”

“I could have applied myself more in school, if I tried.” There's a naked honesty in her voice. “I did, I guess, a few times, but there never seemed to be a point. I mean, who cares if I get an A or a C?” 

She hasn’t told him this part of her story, but somehow it’s not a guess: “No one to put it on the fridge.”

She stiffens, eyes growing hard, mouth curled to say something sharp.

He doesn’t want her to shut him out. “I’ll help you, Eleanor. I don’t break my promises.”

She turns away from him and pulls a book off the shelf, but she seems to soften, a little. He goes back to Kant.

When he looks up again, she’s paging through a hardcover notebook with Chidi’s handwriting, from the night he almost died. Sweat pricks on his back, seeing such a raw piece of himself in someone else’s hands.

For months, he kept it open near his new, triple-bolted air conditioner as a reminder of that heady rush of conviction, while he submitted a half-dozen new papers and signed on for an online lecture series and brutally edited his manuscript—because he had something to _say_ , and for the first time, having it heard felt more important than considering every angle, avoiding every mistake. 

It didn’t last, under rejections and obligations and manuscript readers who no longer answered his emails. He shelved the journal when it started to feel like a joke. 

She asks, “What’s this one?”

He tells her.

Eleanor tilts her head, considering him. Then she brings it over. “Read it to me.”

He strangles a little. “It’s _personal_.”

“I won’t make you read it out loud,” she offers, magnanimous. “I can look over your shoulder.” 

She flew standby across the globe to meet him on nothing more than a youtube video and a gut feeling, with no guarantee he’d even hear her out. She had a near-death experience, too, her own dark night of the soul, and she told him about it before he even offered her a chair to sit in. In the face of bravery like that, he can find the will to at least open a book. 

She settles in next to him, squints at his messy pencil scrawl. “ _‘Learn to...’_ wait, does that say _‘row a boat’_? You almost died and that’s your first regret?”

It seemed important, at the time. “I was unburdening my soul. I wanted to start small.”

She jostles his shoulder with hers. It’s oddly reassuring. He turns the page when she nods, then again, letting her read lists upon lists of his regrets and desires, papers he wants to write, thinkers he wants to meet, places and things he wants to experience. He helps her decode his penmanship and she keeps it blessedly light (“Isn’t that the movie with talking penguins?” “Yes, and Madagascar is also a country.”), and it’s not so bad, really, sharing this, until they come to a page with only one thing on it: 

_Find my soulmate._

His face warms.

Eleanor snorts. “Oh, come on, you can’t tell me you believe in that.”

“Maybe not literally, but isn’t that one of the ultimate things we long for as humans—to be _known?_ To find someone, among the billions, who sees and accepts us in totality and—and needs exactly what we have to offer? Doesn’t everyone want that? Don’t you?” 

“No! Are you—How does that even make _sense_? What if your ‘perfect match’ is in Madagascar or _Wakanda_ —”

“That one’s actually not real.”

“—or outer Mongolia, and you’re here trying to swipe right in Australia, so what, you’re just fucked? Alone for eternity?”

The truth of it feels like a body blow. He thinks of Issa and Sarah and Lauren and the shameful sense of _relief_ he felt when each of them walked out. “If there were a way to be sure—”

Eleanor shoots up from the couch, whirls on him with an intensity that sets him back. _“Nobody_ stays forever, dude.” He watches the urge to hit and run play out on her face in real time, the reflex to slice him where it hurts and just _leave_. “Why can’t it be enough to just find somebody you don’t mind being around for a while?”

Because it never has been, before. He wants to argue with her, wants to scream out the anger and fear and compassion and _need_ clashing in his chest, but all he says is: “I don’t know.” 

She swallows. Stares at him, for a long time, as the tension between them starts to bleed off. 

He doesn’t want her to go. Maybe that could be enough, for now. A first chapter.

“You know,” he says, “I actually tried rowing a boat.” 

She lets out a shaky breath. “And?”

If he died last year, he never would have met her. He’d regret that. “I got lost on a pond the size of a bathtub.” 

She smiles at him, one that grows to light her whole face, and it feels like he’s seeing her for the first time. 

“You’re such a _nerd_ ,” she says, but fondly.

 

*end*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks @al-the-grammar-geek and spouse for the literary suggestions!


End file.
